Mike Marcum became famous in 1996, when he appeared on the radio program Coast to Coast, in the United States, to talk about his daring experiments with time travel.
The electrical engineering student, aged 22 at the time, told radio host Art Bell that he started building a time machine in 1995 at his home in the city of Stanberry, Missouri.
Marcum said the Time Machine design was inspired by the biblical passage “Jacob’s Ladder” and, during the first test of the experiment, he was able to reduce air resistance between two poles using modified CD lasers, causing a arc of electricity moved cyclically between two metal rods.
He claimed to have seen a circular vortex form and decided to throw a screw at the device, the object disappeared inside the vortex and reappeared seconds later, a few meters ahead.
Soon after, the prototype overheated and caught fire, leaving circular burn marks on the ground.
Mike Marcum decided to rebuild the device, this time into an improved version that could withstand more intense testing, but this would require larger transformers to generate the necessary power.
Without the financial resources to build the device, he stole six transformers, weighing 300 pounds, from a power station in Missouri to power his project.
His experiments with transformers caused blackouts throughout the neighborhood due to energy overload and Marcum ended up being arrested by the police and imprisoned for a few months.
The interview on the Coast to Coast radio program took place shortly after he was released.
The program received hundreds of calls from listeners offering new ideas for his experiments, donations of parts and financial support so he could continue with his project without having to steal anything.
This help enabled Marcum to build an even more powerful time machine.
In 1997, he returned to Bell’s Coast to Coast program, stating that his new device was similar to one used by the US military in the Philadelphia Experiment in 1943 during World War II.
The Philadelphia Experiment was a military project that was intended to make military ships invisible by using magnetic fields to bend light, but the experiment was a failure due to a fatal side effect, the intense magnetic fields generated would have created bizarre distortions in space- time. Many of the crew became seriously ill, others disappeared and some were fused to the ship’s metal.
Marcum said it was possible to make the machine work with the correct calibration and using a rotating magnetic field with uniform speed, generated from alternating electric current discovered by Nikola Tesla in 1882.
He stated that the machine would be ready for further testing in a few weeks and he would try it out himself.
Asked by Bell what he could take on time travel, Marcum replied: “just my cell phone”.
Some time later, Marcum mysteriously disappeared, fueling speculation about his successful time travel or whether something went wrong in his experiment.
His fate remains unknown to this day, leaving a mystery as to the veracity of his claims and his whereabouts.
